when I was younger,” Scarlett says out of nowhere. “At least I think we did. Maybe we didn’t. Maybe it was a dream.”
Glory is my older cousin. She lives on the other side of my family’s farm and makes money working as a “psychic.” “You’re saying you had caterpillar and Glory dreams when you were younger?”
“You make it sound strange.” Scarlett rolls her eyes.
“Anything with Glory is strange,” I say. “You want to climb a tree before you go home? The one in the east field is calling our name.”
Her gaze goes straight to the deep cut on my chin that I got when we fell during a recent climb gone bad. Concern flickers through her eyes, and before I can tell her I’m okay, she steps forward and traces my wound. Scarlett’s touch causes my heart to stop and then start at a rate that makes it almost hard to breathe—reactions I don’t understand.
Stop it. She’s my best friend. I’m her best friend. Friends. That’s what we are. That’s what she needs us to be, but…there’s something in her touch….something inside me that feels…different.
Different from when we were six.
Different from when we were ten.
Different from even yesterday.
“Does it hurt?” she whispers.
Yes. “No.”
I see her replaying the accident in her head and she shivers. I know because the same cold chill runs through me as I think of her falling.
“I’m okay,” I say softly.
I wait for her to draw her hand back, but instead she touches me one more time, and my skin burns with her caress. She meets my eyes and it’s all there—the snap of the branch, her scream, the fall…and then there was me jumping from the safety of the tree to catch her.
She steps back and clears her throat. “I should go home.”
“Yeah.” She should. There will be other nights to climb trees.
Scarlett starts for her house, and I join her, right by her side. Around us, the crickets chirp and frogs croak. I shove my hands in the pockets of my jeans as I consider telling Scarlett that my mom’s back in town. She’s been staying with some guy for the past few months. Mom’s been quiet about this one—who he is, what, if anything, he does for a living. But she did tell me that she wants me to meet him next weekend.
I don’t want to go. Meeting Mom’s boyfriends never ends well, but I can’t say no to Mom when she looks at me all hopeful—that maybe this is the one that will work out.
“Do you think high school will be different?” Scarlett breaks the silence and drags me out of my head.
“Different how?”
“I don’t know.” She pulls at the low branch of the tree in front of Gran’s trailer and peels off a large green leaf. “Do you think people will be…friendlier?”
Probably not. The group of kids we’ve gone to kindergarten with will be in our first period class of high school. Can’t imagine being handed an eighth-grade graduation diploma is going to help with their small-minded attitudes. “Maybe.”
“It’s okay if they aren’t,” she says, like she’s honestly fine that people will continue to talk crap about her because she hangs with me. “We have each other. I only hope that we’ll have lunch together. I heard they have two-to-three different lunches and that they divide it up based on where you are in the building around lunch time. It’ll suck if we don’t have lunch together.”
“We’ll have lunch together,” I say as we cross the street. Scarlett and I live in the only two houses at the end of a long gravel road in the middle of nowhere.
“You don’t know that,” she says.
“Yeah, I do.”
“How can you possibly know that? Are you psychic like Glory now?”
I wink at her and grin. “I’ll skip class to have lunch with you.”
She purses her lips. “You can’t do that.”
“I will.”
“You can’t. Skipping will get you into trouble, and even if you could skip one day, you couldn’t skip all year.”
That’s what she doesn’t understand, I would—for her. “You’re my best friend.”
“So?”
“We’ll have lunch together.”
We stop under the tree next to her house, the one that leads to her second-floor room. She looks at me, that incredulous expression she has when she’s aware I’m up to no good—which is often. I hitch my thumbs in the pockets of my jeans and good-naturedly wait for Scarlett’s stern reprimand, but as she goes to open her mouth her head darts to the right, toward her house.